Asus add touch control buttons to its designer monitor range

For

Against

The ML248H is part of the Asus Designo series. As the name suggests, the designers have been hard at work on this model and the panel is slender with a shiny-white casing on the rear.

At first there appeared to be no stand, but further investigation revealed that the package contains two strange metal hoops. You attach one hoop to the back of the panel with a single screw and then attach a second ring that forms the base with a second screw.

The screen is solidly supported and has swivel as well as tilt adjustment, but in terms of design it is unlike anything we have seen before.

The rear of the panel has a small opening to connect the external power adapter and also for the headphone jack, HDMI and VGA inputs.

Although the lower bezel of the display measures a beefy 75mm and looks as though it should house stereo speakers, this is just an illusion, as the ML248H is silent when you use a VGA cable. The headphone jack becomes active when you switch to an HDMI connection.

Asus includes VGA and HDMI-to-DVI-D cables in the box and both worked perfectly. On the other hand, when we fed the Asus with an HDMI-to-HDMI signal, the picture gained a 1cm black border and looked poor, so the blame seems to lie with the Windows signal that is fed to the display, rather than the HDMI input itself.

The picture is perfectly decent, but after we had moved through the Theatre, Game, Scenery, Night View and RGB modes, we left the display in Standard mode as we found that suited us best.

Changing brightness or contrast is easy enough, as there are shortcuts that reduce the button pressing, but diving into the menus, for example to change the headphone volume, is an arduous task.

The Asus people describe the touch controls as a Marmite feature. They may love the controls, but we certainly do not.

The Asus ML248H looks very appealing, but the size of the lower bezel is ridiculous, we didn't get on with the touch controls and the price is too high.